Rhapsody broke my scrobbler! 3 weeks later, problem solved.

For those who scrobble with Rhapsody using RhapsodyScrobbler, I’ve felt your pain.  Ever since a Rhapsody update earlier this month, Rhapsody’s Recent Tracks feed has been broken.  Meaning I’m missing 3 weeks of listening history.  And they’ve been slow as molasses in fixing it.  I’m sure it’s because they’re running it through the same rigorous testing that prevents bugs from making it to production….DOH!

Don’t worry, I still love you, Rhapsody…

Anyway, I just discovered via the Rhapsody forums that someone wrote a scrobbler plugin for Rhapsody that integrates with the Rhapsody player itself.  Works like a charm!  The only mixed blessing is it seems to send track info as a track starts playing, rather than waiting until it is completed.  Perhaps an annoyance to those who prefer to scrobble only after listening to a complete song, but I haven’t minded so far.

Enjoy!

Google Chrome

It’s been over a month since it was released, and I thought I’d give my two cents worth, no matter how banal it may be.  Overall it’s an awesome initial effort from Google!  It is definitely faster than Firefox on my laptop and any slight improvement like that is a welcome plus.  The built-in developer tools and task manager, though not yet on the par of Firefly, are a great addition to an initial release.  Some of the UI effects are slick, such as the download statusbar, and its built-in support for ‘web applications’ is a neat, new feature (to me at least).

That said what I’m really waiting for is to see what happens in the future, specifically their support of add-ons, or extensions.  There were rumors early on that Chrome may support Firefox add-ons natively (similar to AvantBrowser’s Orca), but recently Google said they were going to be creating their own extension system.  A system that they hope is more stable and does not impact the browser’s overall performance.

For now I’m sticking with Firefox 3 until said extension system is completed and we see what types of extensions can be and/or are built.  You can use a proxy like Privoxy to replace Adblock Plus, and there is Greasemetal to allow you to use (some) Greasemonkey scripts in Chrome.  But they really need a vibrant extension community to pull over users like myself, as the performance of Firefox is getting better with each new release and is good enough to keep me from moving away from my highly customized browser.

Related to this, something that slightly worries me is Google’s past history regarding product development.  Don’t get me wrong I love all of their tools such as Docs, Maps, etc. but things like Gmail are still in beta after over 3 years have passed.  New features that you feel would just be built in are being slowly offered via optional Labs settings.  Though Google did an excellent job with their initial releases of Gmail and Chrome, they really need to keep the new features or innovations coming to keep users interested.  This is where extensions are so important, as no one at Google (or Mozilla) could come up with all of these trinkets on their own.

Hiding Windows Components in Windows XP

Something that could really come in handy for those involved in setting up PCs.  I was working on a laptop here and noticed the list of Windows Components on the Add/Remove Components menu was missing every component except the basic networking ones.  I was looking in particular for IIS, as I need to install it for some ASP.NET work.

Sure enough, there’s a ‘config’ file that controls which options are available in the Add/Remove window.  See the file c:\windows\inf\sysoc.inf (note that ‘inf’ is a hidden Windows folder).  Credit to this forum post.

Font Issue – Firefox 3 on Mac OS X

Just upgraded the wife’s Mac to Firefox 3, seemed to be painless and straightforward.  Until she went to use it the first time herself and some sites would show garbled text, what looked like squished fractions for certain text on web pages.  Only certain sites, only certain text.  Wikipedia is one that is usually affected.

Unfortunately not much information can be found on MozillaZine or most support forums.  Mainly because it’s kind of hard to describe or find the right search terms for.  But I did find a support post finally that pointed me to the true fix: disable the Helvetica Fractions font in Font Book.

Hope this helps save an hour of someone else’s time

VB.NET 2.0: Option Strict in code-behind files

Being a C#-leaning programmer in a VB.NET world most of the time, I find myself cringing a little when I find out most architects or developers on my projects are not enabling the Option Strict option in their projects. Option Strict causes a developer to be cognizant of the implicit casts they are putting into their code, adding another layer of protection against data loss and runtime errors. With just a little extra work, you can spend less time testing or tracking down such errors.

Anyway, enough rhetoric, there’s plenty of information online on what Option Strict provides for you. The reason I’m here today is to share a tip on how to enable Option Strict in your code-behind files in a VB.NET web application (or web site). You can enable this option of course in each page/code file, but I recommend making it a global project setting.

Unfortunately, the Microsoft KB article that addresses this doesn’t work. Those web.config settings do not work. However, after some Google-ing I found an ASP.NET forum post addressing this issue. Here’s what you need to add to your web.config:

<system.codedom>
    <compilers>
      <compiler compilerOptions ="/optionexplicit+ /optionstrict+" language="vb;vbs;visualbasic;vbscript" extension=".vb" type="Microsoft.VisualBasic.VBCodeProvider, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" />
    </compilers>
  </system.codedom>

Napster 4.0 released

Wish they could have given us some update via their messageboards, especially as we were clamoring for any hint of an update. I luckily found out from downloadsquad.

Once again the ‘check for update’ tool inside of the Napster client does not detect there is an upgrade. Goto Napster’s homepage and log in. It’ll start synching up with your music collection, to now make it available online, and then prompt you to download the new client.

Ooooo, I can’t wait to use…

Viewing large text files

Needed to look at a 8GB log file tonight.  Don’t ask why it was that big, it shouldn’t have been   Only a brave soul tries to open that with Notepad or any old text pad application.

Once again, Google is your friend, as I found Large Text File Viewer.  It opened that file and only took 2MB of RAM to do it.  Coop sweet!

Bloglines beta

A few weeks ago (I believe) Bloglines unveiled a separate, beta version of an upgrade to their online newsreader. It is available here, just login with your existing user information.

I’ve been testing/switching back and forth between this beta and Google Reader. I gotta say I like love this new beta! It’s much quicker to load than Reader in every browser I’ve tried and the appearance is more appealing to me (always had an issue with Google’s choice of colors/fonts, even using Greasemonkey hacks). Plus you can now reorder your feed list via drag-drop, and it has a 3-pane view that I’ve found myself using for almost all feeds.

Only drawbacks so far: I’d like to use the Quick View for reading feed items, but unfortunately I haven’t found a way to collapse a news item once it’s opened, making for more scrolling than I like. And I’d still like to see them do pinning similar to Starred Items in Google, so they don’t clutter up my viewing of new items within a feed.

But they have been releasing new features and migrating old ones as time has gone on. In just a couple of weeks they’ve updated the default theme to use more bold fonts and added back in pinning, to name a couple. And watch what happens when you hit the ~ key on your keyboard. Who knows where that is going

So expect to see more happen as the beta progresses.

Now I’m no power RSS user, so I can’t critique much beyond that, but especially if you’re a non-power-user like me, I’d highly recommend giving it a try.

Napster scrobbler

Someone in the last.fm forums has written a scrobbler for Napster…sweet!

For those uninitiated, a scrobbler is used to submit song information to last.fm, where you can view my Recently Played Tracks, my top albums, trends in listening, etc. The scrobbler is a little program that I run and sits in my taskbar, monitoring my music player (in this case, Napster), submitting the information to last.fm’s servers.

last.fm offers widgets I can embed on my site so you could see what I’m listening to, which I’m trying to do on this blog, the code is actually there, but it doesn’t show up over to the right…oh well, I’ll keep plugging away…hopefully it’s not a limitation of the fact I use wordpress.com for hosting.

In the meantime, you can check my last.fm profile page.

EDIT: turns out the code wasn’t there. Apparently WordPress.com filters out certain tags, part of the last.fm widget. No biggie, added the RSS feed there instead. Sorry, you’ll have to settle for that until WordPress.com adds the (much-requested) last.fm widget.

Here’s a daily WTF for ya’

Ha! Nerd post here. Fired up IE today to check my work email. All I got was this:

Sweet! I’m not the only one to do that!